


The Branches and the Roots

by jottingprosaist (jane_potter)



Series: The Wheel Turns [7]
Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-28 07:43:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12601648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jottingprosaist
Summary: In Hearthfire, Nilos and Duyana Ulawayn recieve a letter from their son Lleros.Mother, father— I cannot come home. I have killed a dragon and eaten its soul, and the people are calling me Dragonborn.





	The Branches and the Roots

**Author's Note:**

> Day 1 of NaNo, aka "FINISH SOME WIPS YOU DUMMY." It took 517 words to finish this.
> 
> Written for cactusrabbit, who sent me this ask prompt on Tumblr: "So what's it like being the Dragonborn's Mom and Dad? (sorry just reread the bit in your fic where Revyn is like CALL YOUR PARENTS RIGHT NOW)."

**Duyana**  
  
Returning to Nilos is always a pleasure.  
  
Your feet carry you easily around twists and over boulders in the rough track, comfortable after this half century with the way to the Hang. Even the once-alien juniper trees are familiar in your eyes now, their peculiar twisted trunks as good as signposts for the correct ravine or fork of goat track.  
  
The cartway might be easier on your thighs, but you'd rather see Nilos sooner than later. Here, a shortcut up a slope of scree, cutting two hours of switchbacked travel at the risk of cutting yourself to shreds in a fall; there, you can clamber up a steep gully, knowing from the clear sky you'll have the rainless hour necessary to reach the top.  
  
At the mouth of the gully, you grab a fistful of juniper roots and haul yourself up with a last burning effort. Hearing no voices nearby, you lie panting on the ground for a few minutes. There's only the whistle of the wind and the distant crack of a pickaxe echoing off the crags. Eventually, you sit up, drink deeply, and empty the dregs of your waterskin on the juniper's gnarled roots in thanks. You hope it clings on a few more years.  
  
Across the gorge is Hill-Singer's Hang: a narrow valley between high peaks, thirty houses and twice as many terraced fields hacked out of the stone, everything perched at the mouth of a river that runs right to the rock's edge and bursts out into thin air, tumbling fathomless distance to the rest of the river below. For the rest of the distance there is no way forward but a single footpath around the mountain's curving flank to the village hanging on edge.  
  
Hill-Singer's Hang wasn't called that when you first stumbled upon it, but Alabard Hill-Singer has been pressing his primacy of the land in recent years. Letters from Markarth intended for the village as a whole now come addressed to Hill-Singer's care. To your annoyance, the name has stuck even in your mind. If the man ever gets the Thaneship he's been angling for, Nilos will be livid.  
  
_Nilos_.

From this distance it's impossible to make out colours or clothing in the Hang, but you know which field is yours, high up on the slope, so you know the tiny figure bent over in that field can only be Nilos. Immeasurable affection wells up in your chest at the sight of him, dutiful and dedicated, all alone.  
  
"I return, my lodestone," you murmur to the wind, in Dunmeris for him alone. Soon. Soon!  
  
Oh, you're almost back. Not to home— never home, a hundred years gone— but to Nilos, who would be your resting place no matter where you laid your head in this foreign land.  
  
Nilos and Lleros, who may also be waiting for you, if the Three are good today.  
  
You force yourself to jog down the track, pushing through the burn in muscles already tired. You can rest when you're under your own roof. Your son may be there. And whether he is or not, your husband has been without you for this past week.  
  
Guilt rises. You should never have left Nilos, not with Lleros in Cyrodiil— Cyrodiil! Farther even than Winterhold, and completely foreign to your son, out there finding his way among strangers without any guidance. You should be with him... but he wanted to go alone.  
  
(Stubborn boy! Your headstrong, wayward boy. As hard to kill as his parents, even when there is no ruination forcing him to be so tough, so independent, so young. Did you somehow pass that in your blood? Does Lleros feel the Red Mountain looming over him, your son who has never seen sweet Morrowind burning?)  
  
So you should have been with Nilos. Damn Klippar's people for not being able to kill their own cave troll. You wish another troll on them.  
  
At the edge of the Hang, you finally push your goggles up and pull your scarf down. Cold air, wood smoke, fresh bread, and sheep shit. The dirt itself is dirty, path-worn and littered with woodchips. Here is a place where people live.  
  
You pass the scorch-scarred junipers and carved stone faces without leaving a token. That's a homecoming Nord's custom for Nord gods. You do look among the offerings for something shiny, something Cyrodilic. Something Lleros might have brought. There's nothing you can identify, no Imperial bread ration or bottled oil, no fresh-struck septim or pilgrim's token from a shrine.  
  
Maybe he didn't give praise to the Nordgods this time. Maybe he's with Nilos.  
  
"Is the troll dead?" greets Gjalla, ever the squinting sentry from her porch. Wind rattles old bones hanging from the eaves, old Forsworn weaponry strung up to greet all comers under a roof tiled with sun-bleached hide shields. The heads rotted off the ridge beam years ago.  
  
"Yes," you say shortly, uncaring. "Is Lleros returned?"  
  
"No," Gjalla says. She squints for your reaction, clearly taking as much pleasure in curtness as you. "How is Klippar?"  
  
"Poor in goats, now. Too bad, with winter coming on."  
  
She sucks her teeth and glares. You are already marching on, a hard pit in your stomach. Nilos will need you now more than ever if Lleros is still in the wind. The poor man has never learned to bear solitude the way you have, with the heart locked hard around all its needing softness. He tries to hide his anxiety, but you've known him too many years to be fooled by a scowl that the Nords take for truth.  
  
"Hey, Coin-Taker!"  
  
Your teeth grate together. The name is not _your_ name, House-given or skirmish-earned; it is a slur thrown on your shoulders by tongues gossiping bitterly that you dare _demand pay for the work you do_. But Alabard's daughter is not malicious, merely young and stupider than most, failing to understand that the title her parents use for you is no compliment, no toothless word. Stupid children get tongue lashings, not real ones.  
  
"What, girl?" you demand. She hates that title in return, but she is a mere child of twenty-eight, and you won't concede adulthood until she grows some brains.  
  
Looking surly, she still capitulates. "There's a letter for you."  
  
"Dagesh t'Azura," you breathe, heart leaping. "Where?"  
  
You pay silver for the letter she retrieves from her father's house, because you may be a coin-taker but you will not be called miserly, too. Distracted, you turn the letter over in your hands as you feet take you toward your house.  
  
The letter is a single sheet of cheap rag paper, folded and sealed with pine gum. Someone put a mug of ale on it and left rings. Written in a familiar hand, educated and clear even as a charcoal scratch, is _to the Reach, the Druadach Mountains far south-easterly, above Last Outlook, the village on the hanging river_. And below, in place of a name, is Saint Effra's hand sketched and circled.  
  
"Nilos," you shout, sheathed sword beating against your leg as you run up the rocky hillside. " _Nilos_!"

 

* * *

  
**Nilos**  
  
Open on the table is a letter is thrice-stamped: once in green wax with a Redoran retainer's seal, once in black ink by the Imperial post, and once in blue-flecked white wax with an Imperial dragon seal to say the provincial border has been paid its tax.  
  
You have read it a hundred times. You have memorized every chipper word about Cheydinhal, the countryside below the Jeralls, and the warm welcome of Duyana's brother-in-law, whom you have never met. It hurts you to read Lleros' wondering description of a Dunmeri funeral, which without a Temple and priests and ancestral ashpits could be only a poor imitation of the proper rites. At the same time, you are glad that Lleros should know a _little_ of the rites for when you and Duyana pass on. And you are glad that your son should write so happily of _something_ , even if that something is being anywhere but home.  
  
Now you stare at the new letter, short and careless, booze-blotted in some distant Nord tavern.  
  
_I know it has been a long time since I wrote_ , says Lleros, as if that is an apology.  
  
_I was mistaken for a Stormcloak scout at the border_ , says Lleros, as if that somehow makes sense.  
  
_Helgen is gone, as you may have heard, but do not worry, I am safe_ , says Lleros, as if you can simply _not worry_.  
  
_Mother, father— I cannot come home. I have killed a dragon and eaten its soul, and the people are calling me Dragonborn_.  
  
"He's safe, you see," you say through gritted teeth, banging about with the kettle to make tea for Duyana. "Don't worry, our son is safe, off drinking and running around, but he's _safe_ , out hunting _dragons_."  
  
"Nilos," Duyana murmurs, reaching for your arm.  
  
"He must be the finest adventurer in the land!" you shout in Dunmeris, because you cannot bear to be soothed right now. "All these centuries they've been dead, but our son has found _dragons_ to fight!"  
  
"Calm down," she says sharply, glancing to the window.  
  
You bang the teapot on the table and pour with hands that shake. When hot water splashes over your fingers, you are angry enough that the it flashes right into steam from your flesh.  
  
"I have work," you bite out, jerking a bow over the insufficient tea. You have offered Duyana no decent welcome, no proper respect as a returning traveller or as your wife, but the anger and the _shame_ at your anger are too much.  
  
The sun goes down fast and early in the mountains, Skyrim's excessive peaks biting high in the sky and eating the light away. A dim blue twilight has already fallen over the Hang, cupped as it is in a valley; light reflecting off the high peak opposite gives just enough illumination for farmers to gather their tools and bring in the herds before full dark.  
  
You storm up the valley against the flow of homebound neighbours, ignoring their queries. If you so much as curse, your chin will tremble.  
  
Your field is high up in the valley, a portion more stone than earth. On the squat pillar that marks the upper bounds of your field, you sit and stare down at the Hang, trying to breathe slowly. Up here you can see the whole village, its smoke and flaring hearthlights perched precariously on the gorge full of early black shadow. Up here you can see the homeward path, the space between distant peaks where a greater road leads eastward, outward, beyond.  
  
Up here is where you used to wait for Lleros at the end of the day, when he would come down from the juniper with the other children. You never knew then if he would be returning with bird's eggs, berry-stained fingers, or a bloodied nose.  
  
At least back then the damage was never worse than a bloodied nose. Or, no: it was broken once, by human children with their fast-grown fists and casual cruelty. That was the day you arranged to send Lleros away to Markarth, to an apprenticeship, where he would be safe.  
  
Now there is no such place you can send him. Now you cannot even know if he is hurt. If he is dying.  
  
Or if he is off drinking with Nord friends in some comfortable tavern, laughing, kissing, dicing, happy and safe and _selfish_.  
  
You didn't raise him like this. You didn't raise him to run and run and _run_ from his family, to take any education or errand, no matter how far-flung, just for an excuse to get away. To invent absurd lies about long-dead dragons so that he might stay out travelling a little longer. You have done _everything_ for Lleros, but the Nords gave him their words and their stories and their gods and _took him away_.  
  
Or maybe it is your fault. Maybe Lleros learned all too well when you sent him away from home for safety, and now you're paying the price for not better protecting your son when he was small.  
  
Your joints are stiff, sore, when you finally rise from your field's boundary stone. Full night has fallen, purple in the sky and black in the gorge. The wind is icy, but it's a soul-cold that makes you feel so very old as you limp farther up the valley, into the juniper brush.  
  
At the valley's very throat, near the river's roaring source, there is a shrine. It lies buried in brush so thick that there is no path, only a way of least resistance. Where the slope becomes sheer there is a hunch of standing stones, built to shelter a primitive altar from flood and rockslide. Blue paint and orange lichen blot the stones, obscuring the carved patterns beneath.  
  
The squat stone figures on the altar are blurry and weatherworn, their faces gone indistinct. Whether they were beasts or men originally, they are now naught but screaming mouths. Rust stains their feet, the sides of the altar. Generations of Nords have left spearheads and hoe blades, bracelets and beads, all their sacrificial iron reduced to rotten-soft lumps flaking apart like so much dead flesh.  
  
What you seek is beneath the shrine. Behind the shelter of the standing stones, you dig painfully through the accumulated scree. In the near total dark, you're guided by little but your searching fingertips. Finally, knuckles cut and nailbeds crammed with grit, you find the lowest edge of the altar stone. From underneath you scratch out gravel until the offering is exposed, loosened, freed.  
  
The offering cloth falls away in rotten shreds, revealing a flat piece of slate and your ebony knife. Both are untouched by time. On the surface of the slate is an old, old prayer, words you laid down right before planting your very first harvest in the Hang decades ago. It's written in Dunmeris, no matter that the Daedric letters would have given you away as the culprit if ever this parasitic offering had been discovered. But then, the words in Imperial would be damning, too.  
  
_Boethiah who teaches us to endure the Testing and resist that which oppresses,_  
_Mephala who teaches us to evade our enemies and be ruthless in secrecy,_  
_Azura who teaches us to adapt for survival and walk through uncertainty,_  
_To you I offer up the ebony of Morrowind, the iron of blood and soil, the power of this shrine and every sacrifice hereon_.  
  
Now you take up the knife, your one keepsake from Morrowind's volcanic heart, which you thought you'd never wield again.  
  
You press your left hand to the back of the slate, fingers splayed across the blank stone.  
  
You set the knife in place.  
  
You sever the tip of your littlest finger, stutter and tremble and shove- _snap_ between the bones, the bloody joint, the pain, oh Saints, severed flesh, bone and tendon exposed like they should never be, throbbing, unnatural, heat swelling up your throat like no Nilos _do not retch_. Swallow. Suffer. Endure.  
  
The pain, too, is an offering.  
  
You hold your mutilated finger out far from the rest, ginger, trembling uncontrollably. With your right index finger as a pen, you draw through the blood streaming down your wrist and write on the prayer slate.  
  
Never mind that the stone is already covered with blood; never mind that your words in the dark will be illegible. Blood is powerful and intent is sufficient.  
  
_Ancestors and Good Daedra guide my son, blood of this blood, and if I die let my spirit stay with this bone to here await his coming home_.  
  
There should be better ritual, proper offerings and oaths spoken by priests. The bone should not be laid for a ghostfence until after your death. But this is the best you can do here and now.  
  
Lleros may be gone far away from his family, but his family will never be far from him. He is Dunmer and the world cannot unmake him thus.  
  
You stuff a kerchief around your mutilated stump and clench the hand in a fist, trying to withhold both blood and pain.

The stone, the knife, and the dead fingertip go back beneath the Nordic shrine, secret clever insects sucking at the root. You shovel gravel over top, hoping the blood is covered. In the pitch blackness, all is fumbling. Your hands are so, so cold.  
  
You stumble down the rocks, through the juniper. Everything is blind scratching, branches catching, no chance of finding any path. Everything hurts.  
  
At last, you stagger free by luck as much as effort. Outside the thicket the wind is icy, sudden, tearing through the mountain heights. And the walk back down the valley will be a long stumble in the dark, broken only by boulders and unseen terraces. Gods, you are woozy, stumbling already.  
  
But at the edge of the valley, in the cluster of windowsparks and hearthfires glowing gold against the black, there is a single point of red light.  
  
Duyana has lit the lamp, and she is waiting for you to return.

* * *

  
**Duyana**  
  
Nilos comes in from the night silent, stiff, and cold as a stone. Ashen, his lips, purple his poor ears, and his left hand is all over blood.  
  
"Mother Mercy," you breathe. He's offering up his hand even as he stumbles in the door, stunned as a guar-kicked nix: so hurt that he has no idea _why_ , or what to do with the pain. You take his wrist and gentle him through the door. Criticism can come later. Care _now_.  
  
Sodden linen drips blood to the floor. You pull Nilos to the dining board and slide a bare plate beneath his hand, then unwrap the kerchief. Beneath it's not so bad as you feared: only one of his fingers is missing.  
  
One of his _fingers is missing_.  
  
Nilos wheezes at the sight. You grip the back of his neck to steady him. "Hold that," you order, curling his fingers tight on the wet kerchief again. Blood squishes out between his knuckles. " _Breathe_."  
  
The fireplace mantle is an altar of eggshell, porcelain, and glass. The offerings are common but bountiful: lavender, frost mirriam, elves ear, blue and purple mountain flower teas. In the very middle you've carefully arranged a set of ruby glass urns, once salvaged from a Nord shopkeep who didn't know these dust-caked jars were masterworks of the Ald'ruhn Glassery. Each one is a treasure with treasure inside: bittergreen, stoneflower, redspice, white pepper, hackle-lo, and the tiniest pinch of Ascadian saffron paper-wrapped inside the nigh-empty urn.  
  
You sweep over the mantle, hand hovering above the urn of redspice, then decide against it. Velothi pepper can clot the blood from an arterial gush, true. It also burns like lava. And it's not pure in the redspice blend anyway.  
  
No, none of these is what you really need. Salve, bandages, salt, clean water— by the Void, for once it might be nice if there were ice outside— a blanket too, Nilos is cold...  
  
Azura, what you need is _Lleros_. Your clever son, quick to fight and quicker still to nurse a hurt. In him, you can see the brilliant, gentle Restoration mage he'll be when he grows up and out of his Nordic daydreams. When he's no longer driven by the violence you taught him in order to survive his youth, Ancestors forgive you. Every time he visits from the College he is brighter and brighter, full to the brim with explanations of complicated medical and magical processes that fly right over your head. When he comes home, he is sweet and cheerful and popular, volunteering to ease joints and sore muscles, to rub aching hands and brew tisanes for every complaint. By healing people and delivering livestock, Lleros does more for your family's welcome in the Hang than you or Nilos have managed in all your years.  
  
If Lleros were here, he could heal his father. This would be no threat at all. He could probably put the finger right back on.

(Boethiah's whip, where is the _finger_?)  
  
You can tell Lleros all that when he returns from his lies and larking about. There'll be time then for chill and censure. Right now, you'll make do with what Lleros left behind.  
  
All this you think furiously while climbing the ladder to the loft, because you have too much experience with injuries to dither over what-might-be. The loft is above the kitchen hearth and table, meant originally for storage in this little Nordic cabin. When Lleros outgrew the baby-space in bed between you and Nilos, he moved up into the loft and made it his own little den. Now, though he's been gone away to the College more often than not in these last years, the loft is still crammed to the rafters with his herbs and healing books.  
  
At the top of the ladder, you poke your head through the bearskin curtain. The air behind is chill and still. Weird shapes hover in the gloom: eerie orange and greenish lights. You spook for a moment, your instincts shouting _GHOST_ before you recall there are no hallowed spirits so far from House and home. What has the boy _got_ up here?  
  
You have to squint hard to realize that the glow is coming from shelved alchemy ingredients: luminescent mushrooms, insect husks, and some kind of knurled root leering in its jar of white alcohol.  
  
Scoffing, you crawl into the loft and snap a candle-flame onto your fingertip. You scan shelves labelled in Lleros' good strong print and pluck what's needful: a jar of _Bloodstemming_ , a tincture called _Woundclean_ , a box called _Blood Restoration_ and another simply labelled _Pain_. All of it goes in a basket of rolled linen. Halfway out the loft, you snatch the bearskin from Lleros' hay-sack bed, too.  
  
Nilos is still huddled numbly over the table when you ease the bearskin around him, smooth the wiry-soft black fur around his neck. His shoulders shake violently under your hands.  
  
"Peace, husband," you say. (In Dunmeris, which makes it an endearment.) "Here now. Let me see."  
  
It's ugly, the wound. He's missing just the last bone of his littlest finger, but it was severed raggedly and there are stuttering slices all the way up to his first knuckle.  
  
You wash the wound in water, then do as you've seen Lleros do and sprinkle it all over with the Woundclean. Nilos has his eyes clamped to avoid the sight of his capillaries pulsing red out of exposed ash-white flesh. The Bloodstemming is a thick orange salve that finally, finally stops the flow. Over that goes the bandage, a finicky affair on fingertips.  
  
"Almsivi in every hour," you murmur unthinking, as one should at every conclusion. "Breathe, Nilos. Are you cold?"  
  
"Yes," he says, small-voiced.  
  
It worries you that he doesn't lie about it. Frowning, you fetch kettle and cup, because Lleros' mixtures for blood restoration and pain are both tisanes. There are blue mountain flower petals in the first one: your old standby for healing, but with no doubt with a stronger effect here than your usual brew would have managed.  
  
The box of pain herbs has a parchment scrap in it: _DO NOT mix w/ >2pts bonemeal/honeycomb/bee_.  
  
You give the pain herbs a dubious look, then add a pinch to the cup. You've seen Lleros mix these tisanes before, you're certain.  
  
While waiting for the tisane to steep, you fetch the urn of hackle-lo from the mantle. Webspinner's left tit, but it's difficult to roll leaves so dry and brittle. Nilos takes the wad anyway and chews with dull misery. It'll help his colour, at least.  
  
"What _happened_?" you demand at last, now that every concern has been dealt with save one: whether or not you have to take your sword outside.  
  
Slowly, like they're not a part of him, Nilos flexes the fingers of his wounded hand. He's still shaking.  
  
He tells you.  
  
" _Why_?" you snarl, slamming your hands on the table and sweeping away to stalk a wrathful turn of the kitchen. Husband and son, both of them fools! Azura save you from men who couldn't keep their spears attached if they weren't constantly fondling them!  
  
"So I should let him be all alone out in the world?" demands Nilos. "I should—"  
  
"He is _still_ alone."  
  
"Now with a prayer for his sake, at least!"  
  
"You might at least have sacrificed a toe instead!" you snap, turning on your heel. "Something the neighbours wouldn't see!"  
  
When he gets over his instinctive refusal, Nilos has the good sense to look chagrined.  
  
"Now how will you work the soil with that hand not healed," you mutter.  
  
"It will heal," Nilos says gruffly.  
  
"Not soon enough."  
  
"I didn't need that little bit of finger anyway. Never stopped you from anything."  
  
The look you turn on him is half incredulity, half despair, because _oh_ , fool husband, your missing fingers are not reasons in and of themselves for him to think he must sacrifice something. The wounds you've taken from living by the sword are not marks for Nilos to measure up to.  
  
"You needed that finger more than Lleros."  
  
"You don't _know_ _that_ ," Nilos says. In those few words, his voice tremors tellingly before he clamps his jaw tight, biting back every sign of emotion once again.  
  
Of course this is the core of the problem for Nilos, anxious as he is: that he cannot know where Lleros is, what he does, how he fares. He will complain endlessly that Lleros has abandoned you both, but he would not lose sleep if he knew at least that his son was safe.  
  
You can no longer pretend your temper is truly because of Nilos, either. Lleros' careless vanishing sits at the core of your upset, too.  
  
Every inch of Nilos cries unhappiness: stooped gaze, slumped shoulders, and tight miserable mouth. Unable to deny your matching pain, you fold yourself down on the bench beside Nilos, fitting yourself to his side. A small stifled sound in his chest, he turns and curls to lay his face on your shoulder.

A lump in rises in your throat. You smooth his sweat-chilled hair. He needn’t _beg_ so for comfort.  
  
“Take thee to bed,” you murmur in Velothis, the old and heavy words. “And me with thee.”

Nilos turns his head and whispers to the secret curve of your throat, “Ancestors, but you keep me well.” It’s not the proper response to that line of the wedding vows. In his tone alone, it’s far more reverent.

It’s easier to _mean_ your vows after forty years of dedication. By now you both know what it truly is to take your spouse to your breast and keep them well.

Son or no son.

You clean the last of the blood and dust from Nilos’ hands (Almsivi in every hour) and get him to bed. You undress him, and let him undress you in return. His sorry fingers find each new bruise and bump from the cave troll’s wrath, each touch an affirmation that you have come back whole. (Not come home— never home— but back. To him.)

Despite the chill of night, you both huddle beneath the furs naked, your scars and his calluses, twining close to warm each other with flesh and puffing breath until the bed warms too. You’re too tired, the both of you, to desire any attempt at sex. But in the dark Nilos traces letters on your lower spine, and you hold his other hand, sore and tender, against your chest.

“Will he be all right?” whispers Nilos, raw and ashamed of needing to ask. To hear you say it.

“He is our son,” you say. “He has all we could give him. It will be enough.”


End file.
